Betrayal

Then hate me when thou wilt; if ever, now;
Now, while the world is bent my deeds to cross,
Join with the spite of fortune, make me bow,
And do not drop in for an after-loss:
Ah! do not, when my heart hath ‘scaped this sorrow,
Come in the rearward of a conquered woe;
Give not a windy night a rainy morrow,
To linger out a purposed overthrow.
If thou wilt leave me, do not leave me last,
When other petty griefs have done their spite,
But in the onset come: so shall I taste
At first the very worst of fortune’s might;
And other strains of woe, which now seem woe,
Compared with loss of thee, will not seem so.

William Shakespeare, Sonnet 90

Between the summer travels, and the marathon of re-designing the “Art of seeing” site, I completely dropped the ball on journaling — even though the process of studying and painting the sonnets managed to keep up its biweekly rhythm.

There is hardly a single line on this sonnet in my notes, and — even though it has only been a month — I don’t really remember anymore how exactly this image of sunflowers, squashed between the darkness and the shattered space, emerged from the sonnet.

“An unexamined life isn’t worth living,” Socrates reportedly said, but at least I have a painting to show for this unexamined and unrecorded chunk of my life. That’s a consolation.

Since the motto of this studio journal is rawness, I decided not to try and revive these memories to make up a story, but just leave this here, as a note to self (and to you, since you are here reading it): never to neglect journaling again. The fabric of life can dissolve from memory so incredibly fast, and so completely below the threshold of consciousness.

One thing I remember though: that this image somehow rhymed with the sunflowers I painted for Sonnet 18, the very beginning of this love story which has by now completely run its course.

Lena Levin. Sonnet 18: Thy eternal summer. 2012 (click to see a larger image and to read the sonnet).